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I can certainly understand your impulse to make fun of the
Village Voice and Richard Goldstein, but why you’d ally yourself with an idiot like Camille Paglia is beyond me.
Paglia generally speaks in tongues; rarely does an idea work its way through the venom and the spittle. She has spent much of her career ranting about the lack of classic rigor in higher education. She bashes deconstructionism and people go, “Yeah! Fuck that!” because they don’t know what deconstructionism is. She bashes feminists and people go, “Yeah! Fuck feminists!” because her facile arguments imply that all feminists are like Gloria Steinem and Catharine MacKinnon. Paglia’s completely dependent on the ignorance she publicly laments -- if all the people who thought she was so smart suddenly thought anything, about anything, she’d be scrubbing toilets.
I remember reading this thing she wrote once about how she “came from an Italian shoemaking family who truly understood the beauty of fine quality leather.” This isn’t an exact quote, but the spirit is there, and it’s quite usual to find her trafficking in this sort of cheesy inanity. Then she turns around and accuses her detractors of being unable to handle her daring, her brilliance. Well, we all have to dream.
Paglia is not an upstart or a rebel -- she’s just another bitter squeeb who never got tenure at a major university. Forget about her. Do it today.
-- Sarah Miller, letter to the editor, New York Press
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